For a long time, I’ve successfully built the habit of consuming a healthy daily smoothie. My daily smoothie habit begins the night before after dinner time. I regularly practice intermittent fasting where I have dinner at a normal time around 6:00 pm and do not have any other food or calories until my first meal a smoothie around 10:00 am the next day. My typical schedule is to have dinner around 6:00 pm, go to be around 11:00 pm, wake at 7:30 am, work out at 8:30 am, and smoothie at 10:00 am. To break the fast I have my favorite smoothie the smoothie warrior daily smoothie. You can find the recipe here:
A daily healthy smoothie is a great habit to have. Healthy smoothies can be jam-packed with vitamins, minerals, and other nutritious components that can boost the start of your day, fuel a pre or post work out, balance out your diet, or even used to lose or maintain weight. A single smoothie can cover multiple servings of fruits and vegetables that otherwise would be difficult to get in a single sitting or throughout the day.
The Smoothie Warrior Daily Smoothie
The Smoothie Warrior Daily Smoothie
I now do this 5 days a week most weeks with a little more liberty on the weekends around working out and diet. This habit has helped me immensely in maintaining healthy body weight and keeping me energized and ready for the rest of the day. I developed this habit over time and had to experiment to get it to stick. If you think about all times you’ve heard people discuss their goals and new years resolutions you know that it can be hard to start and stick to habits. For me having a framework and a scientific method to go about tweaking my efforts helped me get my health habit routine consistent and high functioning.
I found the perfect framework for building habits from the book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhig. I found this to be an amazing life-changing book for myself. The book is very entertaining containing a mix of real-world habit stories and scientific studies supporting the framework of habit change. Since reading the book I also have listened to the Audible version twice. Listening to the book on 2x speed goes quickly and serves as a good reminder to analyze what habits I currently have, which ones I want to change, and any new ones I want to develop.
The framework that the book is about is called the habit loop. The habit loop consists of three components that lead to a person taking actions either good or bad without having to put much thought to the action.A strong habit happens without the person having to think about it much. The three components are cue, routine, and reward in those specific sequences.
Cue: The cue is the trigger that signals us to start a routine. One common cue is time. If you have an alarm or a certain time for specific routines the alarm or specific time can cue you into a routine. Like your morning alarming going off to set off a morning routine like breakfast, brush teeth, get dressed, etc.
Routine: The routine is the action being taken and usually the behavior that people want to start or end. A person might be cued by agitation or nervousness and move into the routine of smoking a cigarette. Another person might cue themselves by putting on their running shoes with the routine being the running.
Reward: The reward is the payoff for performing the routine.Rewards drive the continuance of routine behavior. Rewards can be anything that will be worthwhile in continuing a behavior. A food treat at the end of a workout routine is an example.
How I set up my habit loop
Having the habit loop framework of cue, routine, and reward allows you to pick apart each step of habit and experiment with the components to get to an optimized state where it works for you and can be hardwired into your life. For me, I wanted to optimize both routine and reward and it was all about having a healthy workout and diet lifestyle. I helped me a lot to name my habit loop which I named the daily workout and healthy smoothie habit. The routine was a workout and the reward being the Smoothie Warrior Daily Smoothie. Here is a breakdown of my daily workout and healthy smoothie habit:
Cue: I wanted to remove any barriers from the workout routine as possible so that when the cue strikes I’m ready to go immediately into a routine without thinking. The night before going to bed I place my work out clothes and shoes at the foot of my bed.
When I wake up in the morning the first thing I do is put my work out clothes and shoes on. Another thing I don’t want to think about is what work out I’m going to do. To resolve this I pre-plan my workouts a week ahead generally incorporating a mix of HITT, cardio, and strength workouts throughout the week. I also have a standard warm-up that I do before every workout.
The cue for me to begin my workout routine is when I press play on my workout Spotify list. I’ve found this to be a personally powerful cue for me to move into routine/action mode. I choose songs that fire me up including songs from that past that are connected high energy moments. I find that once I hit play on the list the routine almost always happens.
Routine: This is the obvious step where the routine is the work out that I have planned for the day. For me, it’s important to pre-plan my workouts and choose workout types that I enjoy or feel will have a big impact on the reason why I’m working out in the first place.
Reward: This is the fun part. Immediately after the workout while sweating I will proceed to the kitchen and collect my reward, a satiating Smoothie Warrior Daily Smoothie. Like the Spotify cue, I find the smoothie to be a very powerful reward. Coming off a 16 hour intermittent fast and workout a nutritious smoothie is the perfect reward. The Smoothie Warrior Daily Smoothie is full of nutrition and I treat it as a post-workout meal replacement.
How to set up your own smoothie habit loop
To set up your own habit loop take a look at your current cues, routines, and rewards and design the specifics of each. Once you have your habit loop designed the next step is to try it out. The night before read through your habit loop to brief yourself on the plan and address any last-minute changes. Before you initiate the habit loop read through the plan again and execute it according to plan. After you’ve completed the habit loop and had your healthy smoothie it’s a good time to do a debrief with yourself. Journaling or documenting how you felt during the cue, routine, and reward is a great way to drive continuous improvement in your habit loop and get it to stick. If something didn’t feel right adjust the plan and experiment the next day. Keep doing it day after day and you will reach a near-perfect process that works for you.
Tips on setting up your own smoothie habit loop
As you look to design your habit loop around smoothies here are some tips to consider when developing and improving your habit loops. One overall tip that has helped me is to name my habit loop. Naming your habit loop makes it real and consciously an act that happens as soon as the cue is triggered.
Cue
Pick a cue that is meaningful to you. For me its when I hit play on my customer workout Spotify list. When the workout songs come on I can feel my mind shift to the workout routine. Other cues related to work out might be putting on your workout shoes or your favorite workout clothes. Some people respond well to timers. A friend of mine likes to use timers except instead of alarms certain songs come on to cue them into a routine.
Another powerful cue is to use a person. By using a person as a cue you get the added benefit of an accountability partner. Have a person have a smoothie with you, work out with you, or even just have them remind you to do the routine.
Routine
Make the routine as barrier-free as possible. Make it simple and immediate to slip into. To make it easier to work out I have tried to remove all decision points that I can. I program my workouts a week beforehand, immediately dress in my workout clothes when I wake up, and have my workout playlist ready to go. All this effort leads to hitting play on the music and immediately going into getting some. Even my workout warm-up is programmed so that I go immediately into it without thinking from one move to the next.
Reward
With rewards, it’s important to experiment. Your goal is to find the right reward that is going to continue the behavior routine.Your reward has to be meaningful and high value for behavior to develop or change. When it comes to a smoothie you want to choose the right recipe that is easy to make and tastes great for it to be a reward in a habit loop. For me, I like enjoy the Smoothie Warrior Daily Healthy Smoothie.
When considering building your healthy smoothie habit the smoothie can be inserted anywhere in the three components of the habit loop. If you want to make a smoothie a cue for a workout you can make it and drink it as a pre-workout smoothie. The cue is the finishing of the smoothie. A smoothie can be a routine. You might wake up and have time for breakfast cue which could be a morning smoothie. And as a reward, I like to enjoy a smoothie after completing my morning workout.
Once you’ve developed good habits by consciously thinking about cues, routines, and rewards the options are limitless and can be developed to stop bad habits and begin new good habits.
